What We Do
Learn more about our mission and how we can help you!
Our Mission
Our mission is to help existing and aspiring Customer Success Managers (CSMs) and CS leaders excel in the highly competitive and rapidly growing profession of Customer Success Management.
To do this, we help both individuals and teams make the right decisions around investing their time and money in their most important asset – themselves – through an investment in training, certification, and CPD (continuing professional development) programs that generate tangible results.
Our ambition is to provide CS professionals of all levels and at all stages in their careers with a meaningful, enjoyable, beneficial, and measurable learning path, that speeds them on their way to the next level of their professional success.
What is “Customer Success Management”?
If a business wants to retain its customers and have them continue to purchase more of its products and services it needs to make sure those customers attain their desired outcomes from the products and services they have already purchased. That’s what Customer Success Management is all about – helping customers to achieve their goals through using the products and services they have purchased from your company.
Customer Success Management is both a philosophy and a department. It is a philosophy (or culture) because everyone within the entire company needs to become customer-centric by aligning their activities to the overarching need to drive business success for customers within everything that the company does. It is also a department that contains professionally trained Customer Success Managers (CSMs) who have specific expertize in Customer Success Management best practices (including processes, tools, skills, and techniques). This enables them to engage with customers to help them with onboarding, adoption, value generation, and value realization (measurement) to ensure that customers attain their desired outcomes from the purchase and use of the company’s products and services.
How do we help with Customer Success Management strategy?
Business Owners and Senior Decision Makers – Your Customer Success Management Vision
We work with your senior leadership team to understand your company’s unique vision for the future, its strengths, weaknesses, and challenges, and its current Customer Success offerings. Then we facilitate a two-part workshop. In the first part, we brief the senior leadership team on current Customer Success Management best practices and overview all of the critical issues that need to be considered when developing a Customer Success Management strategy. In the second part, we enable the processes of brainstorming, discussion, negotiation, and ultimately consensus forming to create your organization’s new Customer Success Management vision and develop a high-level Customer Success Management roadmap for the next three years that utilizes Customer Success Management best practices and which takes into account both your organization’s current situation and its future vision and objectives.
Customer Success Management Team Leaders – Your Customer Success Management Strategy
We work with your VP Customer Success Management or similarly titled head of your Customer Success Management team to research the precise needs of each of your critical customer segments, based on their existing and desired customer journeys (customer journey planning exercises, plus field research in churn analysis). We then help your VP analyze these customer requirements in the light of the company’s pre-existing Customer Success Management vision and high-level roadmap (see above) to determine a Customer Success Strategy that fulfills each of the specific requirements for your unique situation. Finally, we work with your VP to make this strategy real by fleshing out the pre-existing high-level roadmap to becoming a more detailed roadmap with milestones, KPIs, and timelines that will enable progress to be measured and reported on as your company progresses on its strategy implementation journey.
How do we help with customer success delivery?
Our Framework
The Practical CSM Framework enables Customer Success Managers to rapidly and consistently provide best practice help and guidance to customers to assist customers with onboarding, adopting, utilizing, and measuring the value generated from the products and services they have purchased from your company. The Practical CSM Framework is free for companies to use as-is or to adapt as they see fit, and the entire framework is laid out in our book – Practical Customer Success Management: A best practice framework for rapid generation of customer success.
Our Book
Practical Customer Success Management: A best practice framework for rapid generation of customer success sets out our thinking on the role and importance of Customer Success Management and provides in-depth explanations and discussion on how to use our best practice framework called the Practical CSM Framework. The book also includes free access to a series of downloadable templates and checklists that simplify some of the CSM’s most complex tasks and greatly increase their efficiency.
Our Consultancy
Our consultancy services are designed to provide executive business decision makers and CS leaders with the confidence needed to make the right decisions around customer success strategy, and to implement that strategy in an efficient and effective way. We recognize the need for CS both to deliver successes for your customers and to prove the ROI of its outputs to your own organization’s top executives, including the CEO and CFO. Our consultants will work with you, wherever in the world you are to create and implement the best possible CS strategy for your company.
Our Training Courses and Certification Programs
Practical CSM sells a range of training courses and certification programs aimed at both existing Customer Success professionals and those who aspire to become CSMs. These include courses that explain the fundamentals of Customer Success Management best practice, that help prepare for and find your first CSM position, and that provide in-depth specific learning on particular CS-related topics. Our flagship “Certified CSM Professional” (CCSMP) training and certification program provides up to four levels of professional training and certification.
Delivered in an online self-study format, the CCSMP program provides a highly robust, all-around certification in Customer Success Management best practices that take the average student around 80 hours to complete, and culminates in two professional exams to test and prove each candidate’s knowledge and practical abilities. In addition to this, the Practical CSM Academy contains hundreds of learning assets in its library and many hours of live training events each month to enable lifelong CPD learning for CS professionals of all levels.
Our wide range of both standard and customizable classroom workshops take a very hands-on, exercise-driven approach, and are facilitated in real-time by our qualified subject matter experts with many years of experience in both Customer Success Management and training best practices. These workshops can be delivered both on-premises in your own offices or selected nearby classroom facility as well as virtually over the Internet using either Zoom or your own preferred online classroom collaboration platform. Talk to us today about your specific agenda requirements.